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MANUFACTURED CONTROVERSY. "The formula is to amplify uncertainties, cherry-pick experts, attack individual scientists, marginalize the traditional role of distinguished scientific bodies and get the media to report "both sides" of a manufactured controversy." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_controversy View in LinkedIn

RECENT EXAMPLES CONTINUED. "A parallel case is being made by the intelligent design movement in conjunction with its “teach the controversy” campaign against evolutionary biology." http://lnkd.in/dazmtq2 View in LinkedIn

"PROPERTIES OF A BLACK SWAN: the Black Swan is a rare event; it has a massive impact; it has retrospective predictability. While most people are happy with thinking about what they do know, Taleb takes great pains throughout The Black Swan to try and focus his readers on what we don't know — which is far more relevant to the black swan problem." http://lnkd.in/dMvr7Ae View in LinkedIn

RECENT EXAMPLES CONTINUED. The "assault on the science of HIV/AIDS research ingeniously turned the scientific community’s values against it by drawing on the importance of rational open debate, a skeptical attitude, and the need for continued research." http://lnkd.in/dazmtq2 View in LinkedIn

"THE BLACK SWAN: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a book by the essayist, scholar and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans' tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively. This theory has since become known as the black swan theory." http://lnkd.in/daxa8Xs View in LinkedIn

"THREE RECENT EXAMPLES of manufactured controversy are global warming skepticism, AIDS dissent in South Africa, and the intelligent design movement ... The first of these has been called an “epistemological filibuster” because it magnifies the uncertainty surrounding a scientific truth claim in order to delay the adoption of a policy that is warranted by that science." http://lnkd.in/dazmtq2 View in LinkedIn

STATISTICAL OUTLIERS. "The Black Swan application aids users in finding Black Swan events throughout modern history. For this purpose, the application identifies outliers in statistical data and associates them with historic events. An outlier is a point in a statistic that does not “fit” in the overall trend, e.g., an inflection point in a curve." http://blackswanevents.org/?page_id=26 View in LinkedIn

MANUFACTROVERSY. "A manufactured controversy ... is a contrived controversy, typically motivated by profit or ideology, designed to create public confusion concerning an issue about which there is no substantial academic dispute. This concept has also been referred to as manufactured uncertainty." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_controversy View in LinkedIn

"A BLACK SWAN EVENT is an event in human history that was unprecedented and unexpected at the point in time it occurred. However, after evaluating the surrounding context, domain experts (and in some cases even laymen) can usually conclude: “it was bound to happen”. http://blackswanevents.org/?page_id=26 View in LinkedIn

DEEP UNCERTAINTIES. "Decision makers must understand inherent uncertainties surrounding scientific knowledge – including ‘known unknowns,’ or deep uncertainties. Yet, because many non-scientists perceive uncertainty as a lack of knowledge, communicating uncertainty to the public can lead to misunderstanding of core scientific conclusions." http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2014/events/communicating-science-society/ View in LinkedIn